Richard Donahoo Delivers Emotional Story of Grandmother Bilked Out of Savings, Sets Stage for $15M Verdict Against MetLife

In suits where economic losses alone are at the heart of a trial, personalizing the case from the opening is important to ensure the jury can put faces and life stories to the numbers it will hear. In a trial against MetLife for the loss of a grandmother’s life savings in a broker’s Ponzi scheme, Richard Donahoo delivered an emotional opening centered on the personalities involved, en route to a $15 million verdict. 

Christine Ramirez, 75, lost more than $200,000, nearly her entire life savings, after buying into insurance broker Scott Brandt’s pitch to invest in Diversified Lending Group, a bogus fund masterminded by Bruce Friedman. Donahoo, Ramirez’s attorney, contended MetLife was responsible because a managing partner for the insurer supposedly encouraged Brandt and others to sell investors on the fund during MetLife presentations. 

Donahoo opened his case by introducing Ramirez: a mother who found herself divorced after moving from New York to California in the 1970s, but who worked for the next 25 years to buy a home and save what she could, accumulating nearly $300,000 between her home equity and her IRA by the time she retired in 2004. “The evidence will show she’d hoped for a comfortable retirement,” Donahoo said, becoming visibly choked up at the economic disaster that would instead hit Ramirez. “She’d hoped to be able to travel back to New York and visit her family, and to be able to splurge a little bit on her children and grandchildren. To have a safe and secure retirement, and not to worry about her finances. Not to worry about her bills and [to] have a comfortable time in her late 70s and for the rest of her life.”

That wish is one anyone can identify with. But, “that hope and those dreams collapsed” because broker Brandt sold her on Friedman’s bogus investment scheme. But Friedman could only pull off the scheme, Doahoo maintained, by using the credibility of MetLife. “Before Fridman’s companies were brought into MetLife, this man was another mortgage guy on Ventura Boulevard,” Donahoo said. “But with the credibility of one of the country’s most prominent companies, the evidence will show he began to present himself as a billionaire real estate owner who guaranteed 12 percent returns to his investors, and he was able to use MetLife agents to introduce his financial product while they were selling insurance.”

In other words, Donahoo maintained the line of culpability  went straight from Friedman, through MetLife and its managing agent to Brandt, hooking Ramirez on the scheme, and ultimately bilking a hardworking grandmother of her savings. 

Donahoo relayed a heart-tugging story and argued the path of guilt had MetLife at its epicenter. It was a narrative that resonated with the jury and set the stage for a $15 million award.